How Peter Thiel’s Palantir Helped the NSA Spy on the Whole World

Illustration: Erik Carter for The InterceptIllustration: Erik Carter for The Intercept

Donald Trump has inherited the most powerful machine for spying ever devised. How this petty, vengeful man might wield and expand the sprawling American spy apparatus, already vulnerable to abuse, is disturbing enough on its own. But the outlook is even worse considering Trump’s vast preference for private sector expertise and new strategic friendship with Silicon Valley billionaire investor Peter Thiel, whose controversial (and opaque) company Palantir has long sought to sell governments an unmatched power to sift and exploit information of any kind. Thiel represents a perfect nexus of government clout with the kind of corporate swagger Trump loves. The Intercept can now reveal that Palantir has worked for years to boost the global dragnet of the NSA and its international partners, and was in fact co-created with American spies.

Peter Thiel became one of the American political mainstream’s most notorious figures in 2016 (when it emerged he was bankrolling a lawsuit against Gawker Media, my former employer) even before he won a direct line to the White House.Now he brings to his role as presidential adviser decades of experience as kingly investor and token nonliberal on Facebook’s board of directors, a Rolodex of software luminaries, and a decidedly Trumpian devotion to controversy and contrarianism. But perhaps the most appealing asset Thiel can offer our bewildered new president will be Palantir Technologies, which Thiel founded with Alex Karp and Joe Lonsdale in 2004.

Palantir has never masked its ambitions, in particular the desire to sell its services to the U.S. government — the CIA itself was an early investor in the startup through In-Q-Tel, the agency’s venture capital branch. But Palantir refuses to discuss or even name its government clientele, despite landing “at least $1.2 billion” in federal contracts since 2009, according to an August 2016 report in Politico. The company was last valued at $20 billion and is expected to pursue an IPO in the near future. In a 2012 interview with TechCrunch, while boasting of ties to the intelligence community, Karp said nondisclosure contracts prevent him from speaking about Palantir’s government work.

“Palantir” is generally used interchangeably to refer to both Thiel and Karp’s company and the software that company creates. Its two main products are Palantir Gotham and Palantir Metropolis, more geeky winks from a company whose Tolkien namesake is a type of magical sphere used by the evil lord Sauron to surveil, trick, and threaten his enemies across Middle Earth. While Palantir Metropolis is pegged to quantitative analysis for Wall Street banks and hedge funds, Gotham (formerly Palantir Government) is designed for the needs of intelligence, law enforcement, and homeland security customers. Gotham works by importing large reams of “structured” data (like spreadsheets) and “unstructured” data (like images) into one centralized database, where all of the information can be visualized and analyzed in one workspace. For example, a 2010 demo showed how Palantir Government could be used to chart the flow of weapons throughout the Middle East by importing disparate data sources like equipment lot numbers, manufacturer data, and the locations of Hezbollah training camps. Palantir’s chief appeal is that it’s not designed to do any single thing in particular, but is flexible and powerful enough to accommodate the requirements of any organization that needs to process large amounts of both personal and abstract data.

A Palantir promotional video.

Despite all the grandstanding about lucrative, shadowy government contracts, co-founder Karp does not shy away from taking a stand in the debate over government surveillance. In a Forbes profile in 2013, he played privacy lamb, saying, “I didn’t sign up for the government to know when I smoke a joint or have an affair. … We have to find places that we protect away from government so that we can all be the unique and interesting and, in my case, somewhat deviant people we’d like to be.” In that same article, Thiel lays out Palantir’s mission with privacy in mind: to “reduce terrorism while preserving civil liberties.” After the first wave of revelations spurred by the whistleblower Edward Snowden, Palantir was quick to deny that it had any connection to the NSA spy program known as PRISM, which shared an unfortunate code name with one of its own software products. The current iteration of Palantir’s website includes an entire section dedicated to “Privacy & Civil Liberties,” proclaiming the company’s support of both:

Palantir Technologies is a mission-driven company, and a core component of that mission is protecting our fundamental rights to privacy and civil liberties. …

Some argue that society must “balance” freedom and safety, and that in order to better protect ourselves from those who would do us harm, we have to give up some of our liberties. We believe that this is a false choice in many areas. Particularly in the world of data analysis, liberty does not have to be sacrificed to enhance security. Palantir is constantly looking for ways to protect privacy and individual liberty through its technology while enabling the powerful analysis necessary to generate the actionable intelligence that our law enforcement and intelligence agencies need to fulfill their missions.

It’s hard to square this purported commitment to privacy with proof, garnered from documents provided by Edward Snowden, that Palantir has helped expand and accelerate the NSA’s global spy network, which is jointly administered with allied foreign agencies around the world. Notably, the partnership has included building software specifically to facilitate, augment, and accelerate the use of XKEYSCORE, one of the most expansive and potentially intrusive tools in the NSA’s arsenal. According to Snowden documents published by The Guardian in 2013, XKEYSCORE is by the NSA’s own admission its “widest reaching” program, capturing “nearly everything a typical user does on the internet.” A subsequent report by The Intercept showed that XKEYSCORE’s “collected communications not only include emails, chats, and web-browsing traffic, but also pictures, documents, voice calls, webcam photos, web searches, advertising analytics traffic, social media traffic, botnet traffic, logged keystrokes, computer network exploitation targeting, intercepted username and password pairs, file uploads to online services, Skype sessions, and more.” For the NSA and its global partners, XKEYSCORE makes all of this as searchable as a hotel reservation site.

But how do you make so much data comprehensible for human spies? As the additional documents published with this article demonstrate, Palantir sold its services to make one of the most powerful surveillance systems ever devised even more powerful, bringing clarity and slick visuals to an ocean of surveillance data.

An office building occupied by the technology firm Palantir in McLean, Va., on Oct. 11, 2014.

Photo: Kristoffer Tripplaar/Sipa USA/AP

Palantir’s relationship with government spy agencies appears to date back to at least 2008, when representatives from the U.K.’s signals intelligence agency, Government Communications Headquarters, joined their American peers at VisWeek, an annual data visualization and computing conference organized by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology. Attendees from throughout government and academia gather to network with members of the private sector at the event, where they compete in teams to solve hypothetical data-based puzzles as part of the Visual Analytics Science and Technology (VAST) Challenge. As described in a document saved by GCHQ, Palantir fielded a team in 2008 and tackled one such scenario using its own software. It was a powerful marketing opportunity at a conference filled with potential buyers.

In the demo, Palantir engineers showed how their software could be used to identify Wikipedia users who belonged to a fictional radical religious sect and graph their social relationships. In Palantir’s pitch, its approach to the VAST Challenge involved using software to enable “many analysts working together [to] truly leverage their collective mind.” The fake scenario’s target, a cartoonishly sinister religious sect called “the Paraiso Movement,” was suspected of a terrorist bombing, but the unmentioned and obvious subtext of the experiment was the fact that such techniques could be applied to de-anonymize and track members of any political or ideological group. Among a litany of other conclusions, Palantir determined the group was prone to violence because its “Manifesto’s intellectual influences include ‘Pancho Villa, Che Guevara, Leon Trotsky, [and] Cuban revolutionary Jose Martí,’ a list of military commanders and revolutionaries with a history of violent actions.”

The delegation from GCHQ returned from VisWeek excited and impressed. In a classified report from those who attended, Palantir’s potential for aiding the spy agency was described in breathless terms. “Palantir are a relatively new Silicon Valley startup who are sponsored by the CIA,” the report began. “They claim to have significant involvement with the US intelligence community, although none yet at NSA.” GCHQ noted that Palantir “has been developed closely internally with intelligence community users (unspecified, but likely to be the CIA given the funding).” The report described Palantir’s demo as “so significant” that it warranted its own entry in GCHQ’s classified internal wiki, calling the software “extremely sophisticated and mature. … We were very impressed. You need to see it to believe it.”

The report conceded, however, that “it would take an enormous effort for an in-house developed GCHQ system to get to the same level of sophistication” as Palantir. The GCHQ briefers also expressed hesitation over the price tag, noting that “adoption would have [a] huge monetary … cost,” and over the implications of essentially outsourcing intelligence analysis software to the private sector, thus making the agency “utterly dependent on a commercial product.” Finally, the report added that “it is possible there may be concerns over security — the company have published a lot of information on their website about how their product is used in intelligence analysis, some of which we feel very uncomfortable about.”

A page from Palantir’s “Executive Summary” document, provided to government clients.

However anxious British intelligence was about Palantir’s self-promotion, the worry must not have lasted very long. Within two years, documents show that at least three members of the “Five Eyes” spy alliance between the United States, the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, and Canada were employing Palantir to help gather and process data from around the world. Palantir excels at making connections between enormous, separate databases, pulling big buckets of information (call records, IP addresses, financial transactions, names, conversations, travel records) into one centralized heap and visualizing them coherently, thus solving one of the persistent problems of modern intelligence gathering: data overload.

Palantir is an information management platform for analysis developed by Palantir Technologies. It integrates structured and unstructured data, provides search and discovery capabilities, knowledge management, and collaborative features. The goal is to offer the infrastructure, or ‘full stack,’ that intelligence organizations require for analysis.

Bullet-pointed features of note included a “Graph View,” “Timelining capabilities,” and “Geo View.”

A GCHQ diagram indicates how Palantir could be used as part of a computer network attack.

Under the Five Eyes arrangement, member countries collect and pool enormous streams of data and metadata collected through tools like XKEYSCORE, amounting to tens of billions of records. The alliance is constantly devising (or attempting) new, experimental methods of prying data out of closed and private sources, including by hacking into computers and networks in non-Five Eyes countries and infecting them with malware.

A 2011 PowerPoint presentation from GCHQ’s Network Defence Intelligence & Security Team (NDIST) — which, as The Intercept has previously reported, “worked to subvert anti-virus and other security software in order to track users and infiltrate networks” — mentioned Palantir as a tool for processing data gathered in the course of its malware-oriented work. Palantir’s software was described as an “analyst workspace [for] pulling together disparate information and displaying it in novel ways,” and was used closely in conjunction with other intelligence software tools, like the NSA’s notorious XKEYSCORE search system. The novel ways of using Palantir for spying seemed open-ended, even imaginative: A 2010 presentation on the joint NSA-GCHQ “Mastering the Internet” surveillance program mentioned the prospect of running Palantir software on “Android handsets” as part of a SIGINT-based “augmented reality” experience. It’s unclear what exactly this means or could even look like.

Above all, these documents depict Palantir’s software as a sort of consolidating agent, allowing Five Eyes analysts to make sense of tremendous amounts of data that might have been otherwise unintelligible or highly time-consuming to digest. In a 2011 presentation to the NSA, classified top secret, an NDIST operative noted the “good collection” of personal data among the Five Eyes alliance but lamented the “poor analytics,” and described the attempt to find new tools for SIGINT analysis, in which it “conducted a review of 14 different systems that might work.” The review considered services from Lockheed Martin and Detica (a subsidiary of BAE Systems) but decided on the up-and-comer from Palo Alto.

Palantir is described as having been funded not only by In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital branch, but furthermore created “through [an] iterative collaboration between Palantir computer scientists and analysts from various intelligence agencies over the course of nearly three years.” While it’s long been known that Palantir got on its feet with the intelligence community’s money, it has not been previously reported that the intelligence community actually helped build the software. The continuous praise seen in these documents shows that the collaboration paid off. Under the new “Palantir Model,” “data can come from anywhere” and can be “asked whatever the analyst wants.”

Along with Palantir’s ability to pull in “direct XKS Results,” the presentation boasted that the software was already connected to 10 other secret Five Eyes and GCHQ programs and was highly popular among analysts. It even offered testimonials (TWO FACE appears to be a code name for the implementation of Palantir):

[Palantir] is the best tool I have ever worked with. It’s intuitive, i.e. idiot-proof, and can do a lot you never even dreamt of doing.

This morning, using TWO FACE rather than XKS to review the activity of the last 3 days. It reduced the initial analysis time by at least 50%.

Enthusiasm runs throughout the PowerPoint: A slide titled “Unexpected Benefits” reads like a marketing brochure, exclaiming that Palantir “interacts with anything!” including Google Earth, and “You can even use it on a iphone or laptop.” The next slide, on “Potential Downsides,” is really more praise in disguise: Palantir “Looks expensive” but “isn’t as expensive as expected.” The answer to “What can’t it do?” is revealing: “However we ask, Palantir answer,” indicating that the collaboration between spies and startup didn’t end with Palantir’s CIA-funded origins, but that the company was willing to create new features for the intelligence community by request.

On GCHQ’s internal wiki page for TWO FACE, analysts were offered a “how to” guide for incorporating Palantir into their daily routine, covering introductory topics like “How do I … Get Data from XKS in Palantir,” “How do I … Run a bulk search,” and “How do I … Run bulk operations over my objects in Palantir.”For anyone in need of a hand, “training is currently offered as 1-2-1 desk based training with a Palantir trainer. This gives you the opportunity to quickly apply Palantir to your current work task.” Palantir often sends “forward deployed engineers,” or FDEs, to work alongside clients at their offices and provide assistance and engineering services, though the typical client does not have access to the world’s largest troves of personal information. For analysts interested in tinkering with Palantir, there was even a dedicated instant message chat room open to anyone for “informally” discussing the software.

The GCHQ wiki includes links to classified webpages describing Palantir’s use by the Australian Defence Signals Directorate (now called the Australian Signals Directorate) and to a Palantir entry on the NSA’s internal “Intellipedia,” though The Intercept does not have access to copies of the linked sites. However, embedded within Intellipedia HTML files available to The Intercept are references to a variety of NSA-Palantir programs, including “Palantir Classification Helper,” “[Target Knowledge Base] to Palantir PXML,” and “PalantirAuthService.” (Internal Palantir documents obtainedby TechCrunch in 2013 provide additional confirmation of the NSA’s relationship with the company.)

One Palantir program used by GCHQ, a software plug-in named “Kite,” was preserved almost in its entirety among documents provided to The Intercept. An analysis of Kite’s source code shows just how much flexibility the company afforded Five Eyes spies. Developers and analysts could ingest data locally using either Palantir’s “Workspace” application or Kite. When they were satisfied the process was working properly, they could push it into a Palantir data repository where other Workspace users could also access it, almost akin to a Google Spreadsheets collaboration. When analysts were at their Palantir workstation, they could perform simple imports of static data, but when they wanted to perform more complicated tasks like import databases or set up recurring automatic imports, they turned to Kite.

Kite worked by importing intelligence data and converting it into an XML file that could be loaded into a Palantir data repository. Out of the box, Kite was able to handle a variety of types of data (including dates, images, geolocations, etc.), but GCHQ was free to extend it by writing custom fields for complicated types of data the agency might need to analyze. The import tools were designed to handle a variety of use cases, including static data sets, databases that were updated frequently, and data stores controlled by third parties to which GCHQ was able to gain access.

This collaborative environment also produced a piece of software called “XKEYSCORE Helper,” a tool programmed with Palantir (and thoroughly stamped with its logo) that allowed analysts to essentially import data from the NSA’s pipeline, investigate and visualize it through Palantir, and then presumably pass it to fellow analysts or Five Eyes intelligence partners. One of XKEYSCORE’s only apparent failings is that it’s so incredibly powerful, so effective at vacuuming personal metadata from the entire internet, that the volume of information it extracts can be overwhelming. Imagine trying to search your Gmail account, only the results are pulled from every Gmail inbox in the world.

Making XKEYSCORE more intelligible — and thus much more effective — appears to have been one of Palantir’s chief successes. The helper tool, documented in a GCHQ PDF guide, provided a means of transferring data captured by the NSA’s XKEYSCORE directly into Palantir, where presumably it would be far easier to analyze for, say, specific people and places. An analyst using XKEYSCORE could pull every IP address in Moscow and Tehran that visited a given website or made a Skype call at 14:15 Eastern Time, for example, and then import the resulting data setinto Palantir in order to identify additional connections between the addresses or plot their positions using Google Earth.

Palantir was also used as part of a GCHQ project code-named LOVELY HORSE, which sought to improve the agency’s ability to collect so-called open source intelligence — data available on the public internet, like tweets, blog posts, and news articles. Given the “unstructured” nature of this kind of data, Palantir was cited as “an enrichment to existing [LOVELY HORSE] investigations … the content should then be viewable in a human readable format within Palantir.”

Palantir’s impressive data-mining abilities are well-documented, but so too is the potential for misuse. Palantir software is designed to make it easy to sift through piles of information that would be completely inscrutable to a human alone, but the human driving the computer is still responsible for making judgments, good or bad.

A 2011 document by GCHQ’s SIGINT Development Steering Group, a staff committee dedicated to implementing new spy methods, listed some of these worries. In a table listing “risks & challenges,” the SDSG expressed a “concern that [Palantir] gives the analyst greater potential for going down too many analytical paths which could distract from the intelligence requirement.” What it could mean for analysts to distract themselves by going down extraneous “paths” while browsing the world’s most advanced spy machine is left unsaid. But Palantir’s data-mining abilities were such that the SDSG wondered if its spies should be blocked from having full access right off the bat and suggested configuring Palantir software so that parts would “unlock … based on analysts skill level, hiding buttons and features until needed and capable of utilising.” If Palantir succeeded in fixing the intelligence problem of being overwhelmed with data, it may have created a problem of over-analysis — the company’s software offers such a multitude of ways to visualize and explore massive data sets that analysts could get lost in the funhouse of infographics, rather than simply being overwhelmed by the scale of their task.

If Palantir’s potential for misuse occurred to the company’s spy clients, surely it must have occurred to Palantir itself, especially given the company’s aforementioned “commitment” to privacy and civil liberties. Sure enough, in 2012 the company announced the formation of the Palantir Council of Advisors on Privacy and Civil Liberties, a committee of academics and consultants with expertise in those fields. Palantir claimed that convening the PCAP had “provided us with invaluable guidance as we try to responsibly navigate the often ill-defined legal, political, technological, and ethical frameworks that sometimes govern the various activities of our customers,” and continued to discuss the privacy and civil liberties “implications of product developments and to suggest potential ways to mitigate any negative effects.” Still, Palantir made clear that the “PCAP is advisory only — any decisions that we make after consulting with the PCAP are entirely our own.”

What would a privacy-minded conversation about privacy-breaching software look like? How had a privacy and civil liberties council navigated the fact that Palantir’s clientele had directly engaged in one of the greatest privacy and civil liberties breaches of all time? It’s hard to find an answer.

Palantir wrote thatit structured the nondisclosure agreement signed by PCAP members so that they “will be free to discuss anything that they learn in working with us unless we clearly designate information as proprietary or otherwise confidential (something that we have rarely found necessary except on very limited occasions).” But despite this assurance of transparency, all but one of the PCAP’s former and current members either did not return a request for comment for this article or declined to comment citing the NDA.

The former PCAP member who did respond, Stanford privacy scholar Omer Tene, told The Intercept that he was unaware of “any specific relationship, agreement, or project that you’re referring to,” and said he was not permitted to answer whether Palantir’s work with the intelligence community was ever a source of tension with the PCAP. He declined to comment on either the NSA or GCHQ specifically. “In general,” Tene said, “the role of the PCAP was to hear about client engagement or new products and offerings that the company was about to launch, and to opine as to the way they should be set up or delivered in order to minimize privacy and civil liberties concerns.” But without any further detail, it’s unclear whether the PCAP was ever briefed on the company’s work for spy agencies, or whether such work was a matter of debate.

There’s little detail to be found on archived versions of Palantir’s privacy and civil liberties-focused blog, which appears to have been deleted sometime after the PCAP was formed. Palantir spokesperson Matt Long told The Intercept to contact the Palantir media team for questions regarding the vanished blog at the same email address used to reach Long in the first place. Palantir did not respond to additional repeated requests for comment and clarification.

A GCHQ spokesperson provided a boilerplate statement reiterating the agency’s “longstanding policy” against commenting on intelligence matters and asserted that all its activities are “carried out in accordance with a strict legal and policy framework.” The NSA did not provide a response.

Anyone worried that the most powerful spy agencies on Earth might use Palantir software to violate the privacy or civil rights of the vast number of people under constant surveillance may derive some cold comfort in a portion of the user agreement language Palantir provided for the Kite plug-in, which stipulates that the user will not violate “any applicable law” or the privacy or the rights “of any third party.” The world will just have to hope Palantir’s most powerful customers follow the rules.

“A yod kite is similar to a kite, but instead of three trines plus a fourth planet opposite to one of them, a yod kite is a yod with a fourth planet opposite to the planet at the vertex of the quincunxes and semisextile to the other two.
Here is a yod kite (Su-Sa-Ne-Ur) which occurred at the time of the Deepwater Horizon blowout (22:00 CDT on April 20, 2010).”

An expose of the ‘Shadow (deep state) Government’ is nice, but have I missed something – or do ‘you people’ DELIBERATELY NOT TELL ‘us peasants’ in the John Lennon sense of “Working Class Hero” what a threat Islamic infiltration of the USA is, esp. to women, like ‘honor killing’, FEMALE GENITAL MUTILATION – I guess not ’cause ‘you are all willfully ignorant pricks & assholes & homosexuals’…NO?!…Better yet, ‘tolerant liberals’!?

Crazy world we live in, where the government of a single nation is responsible for unimaginable attrocities; like killing 200k people in 5 seconds, over 1,000,000 in Iraq alone under false pretenses (WMDs), Gulf on Tonkin incident (yet another lie resulting in thousands dead) but yet absolutely no other nation (s) dare unite against this modern genocide thats has plagued our way of living for decades upon decades. When will it end? When will the people of our nation open their eyes? Bernie was our only chance at somewhat dismantling this and instead they (Clintons, DNC, etc) dismantled us and the movement is the most fucked up way possible.

The boilerplate denials not only come out of this Thiel contracted work, but also out of the mouth of this “so-called” president. He claimed all sorts of loyalty to “the people”, and has and will deliver NOTHING for them, but everything on his pen is and will be soiled with working for the DEVIL – American Corporate Owners and CEO’s who are going to do everything in their power to destroy the EARTH, the WATER, AIR and middle class WORKERS and STUDENTS, not to mention those Seniors who are the most vulnerable people in the world. They do not give a DAMN about anyone outside their own tiny circle of 1% filthy rich.

In some conservative circles they have for months been arguing that the defeat of HRC and the leaks by intelligence services to the media, et al were symptoms of vitriol of the CIA, NSA, etc., against the Trump election win and portends the fight ahead. The naive conservaties ex ante conclusion was DJT’ would stall at least and hopefully end the congressional-military-industrial complex. This article along with Trump’s latest statements about expanding nucleur weapons and the US Navy ought to dispel those neophyte conservatives naivete about Trump. He was, is and shall be our Berlesconi of Italy except DJT has a terrifying array of spy systems and the armed services at his ready disposal.

If the US citizenry doesn’t wake up and stop him and his administration the only remaining safeguard will be the military and the security agencies that are constantly warning us against this man-child’s desultorious behavior and inferior intellect at geopolitics, debt, macroeconomics and accounting. His only strength is his marketing skills which is vacuous as President of the US.

This is awesome. Imagine putting on a Microsoft Hololens and being able to see terrorists highlighted on the battlefield and at a shopping mall. Now imagine seeing every porno that terrorist has ever watched. Now imagine identifying homosexuals. Augmented reality IS the future. Tim Cook is right.

You know, this software actually does inspire me somewhat, it’s a great tool with a well designed mission. It’s unfortunate that the public do not have access to it. The safest thing to do for the entire world would not be to try and stop Palantir, or the agencies themselves, it would be simply to make all this information fully public.

Bitcoin is probably the world’s most secure method of transaction, because the security doesn’t rely on any corporate bank executive (who most likely would be motivated purely by money) it doesn’t rely on any government department (who could be corrupt, fascist and seeking to gain power, or tied to industry with profit aims) and it doesn’t rely on any one individual. It’s distributed openly and world wide.

Unfortunately what you typically hear from the intelligence community is that “releasing this information will support our enemies”. It will, but it will also open the information to millions of good people, and there are more good people in the world than bad. They know this, of course, and simply like having the exclusive power to peer in to people’s lives.

The fact that a piece of software like this can pull in and analyze vast troves of shipping manifests, metadata and so on is amazing and very useful for stopping money laundering, human trafficking, and so on. A piece of software like this could be used for science, understanding biological systems and incredibly complex combinations of things like the universe.

The sad thing is that the keys have been handed over to a secretive group of individuals who we are ordered to “trust” rather than given to the public who could make the most use of it.

A lot of people here at the Intercept seem to oppose the intelligence community and I think it’s fair but a bit misguided. We pay for this data to be collected, and for the analysts to analyze it, through our taxes. We want some data to be collected just like we want police officers able to patrol the public streets able to view all of us and stop crimes (but we have some privacy like in our homes – unfortunately our homeless do not enjoy this right). Similarly our metadata should be public (to help prevent crimes) but our email and Skype call content should not be. Concerns about metadata are only valid concerns insofar as we do not trust the organization that is keeping and storing it.

The important thing is that we claw back truly public control and oversight of the data we are paying to collect.

[[[ You know, this software actually does inspire me somewhat, it’s a great tool with a well designed mission. It’s unfortunate that the public do not have access to it. The safest thing to do for the entire world would not be to try and stop Palantir, or the agencies themselves, it would be simply to make all this information fully public. ]]]

Second sentence, and I am done, with this article, and increasingly with this site. You are allowing it to be run into the ground with absurd partisan hatred. It is immature, lazy, unprofessional, high school in tone. It is also a waste of time, both my time, and the time it took to put this together, only to sabotage it in the second sentence. You are undermining your own work, and you clearly have no concept how this appears to readers, and how it is drives people away from reading anything else you have to say. If your judgement is this poor, then I must doubt any other conclusions you make as well as the information you have chosen to provide. What a disappointment. The best I can hope is that in scanning the comments, someone might post a link to another site or a youtube video analyzing Palantir, a source that knows that administrations come and go, that the company dates back many years, and that it’s relevance was the same on Jan. 19th as on Jan. 20th.

Amen, sister. Why should I believe and trust what this asshat has to say when right off the bat he discloses himself as a juvenile, partisan hack? I’m glad he did it right away. No way am I wasting my time with this b.s.

Brigid, Is that what you got out of the article? Were you really done then? Did you read the article? Are you saying the president is not petty or vengeful? Or, are you saying that Sam isn’t entitled to his opinion? He wrote a piece that has investigative, technical, controversial, and editorial content. Letting us know right off the bat where he was coming from should help us turn on our eye for discernment. We can read his piece and question what we need to and do our own homework. Its not undermining for me, on the contrary, it frames his work. It’s interesting, don’t you think that your comments, and Mr. Steve D below, seem even more ” immature, lazy, unprofessional, high school in tone” than Mr Biddle’s. Sadly, we have argument about an argument. Perhaps our collective intellect should be pondering instead the thought provoking ideas Mr. Biddle’s piece enunciates and invokes. Brigid is my daughter’s middle name, after her Irish great, great Aunt. Yesterday was her birthday. Peace Brigid.

As a Tolkien scholar and a Professor Emeritus of the Unseen University, I would like to correct the errant impression created by this article that the Evil Lord Sauron was somehow responsible for the creation of the palantír or more more correctly palantíri (the plural form of palantír.)

They were in fact created by Fëanor, the great artificer of the High Elves and given to the “Men of the West” to safeguard their empire. Aragorn, the rightful heir of Númenor, was able to seize control of the Palantir and turn it against Sauron. This is well-known among the Wise.

It is sad to see that the malaise of Fake News has led to a general collapse in scholarly rigor and journalistic integrity.

“The two Soros agents John McCain and Lindsey Graham in the Ukraine ensure that the leadership escalates the war against the Donbass.

By Marco Maier
As stated in a previous article, some high-ranking Republican politicians are among the paid agents of George Soros, who is also trying to get his hatred against the Kremlin in Ukraine. Among them are the two senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, who intervene again and again in the Ukraine crisis.
These two politicians are now spurning Kiev on the open break of the arms rifle in the Donbass, as James Carden points out in a contribution to the US newspaper “The Nation”. The latest offensive of the Ukrainian army on the rebels would thus be directly related to the visit of the Republicans in Kiev, which was just before escalation by the government forces.
The two visited Ukrainian soldiers on the dividing line. “Your struggle is our struggle. 2017 will be the year of the offensive, “said Graham to the soldiers. “I believe you will be victorious. I’m convinced of that, “McCain added. “We will do all we can to provide you with everything you need,” he said, as the article says.
This shows once again how great the impact of the multimillionaire on US policy is, and how his agendas ultimately have international effects. The blood of innocent people in the Donbass clings to the hands of all those involved.”

From a technical perspective I would like a more information on the software stack they are using. It will give clues as to the capabilities of the software as well as its provenance.

One area to look at is the libraries it uses. Is it DotNet? Python? Java? What is the overall architecture of the program? What framework(s) are they using? Are they using open source resources? What build tool chain(s) are they using? What systems will it run on? Versioning information? Build dates? Release dates? Is this the debug version? If so, grab the debug file and decompile.

Decompile the executable and look for module stubs and special drivers. DotNet software requires digital signatures and so will anything else that goes onto high level government computers. Check the signatures. What authentication/credential system are they using?

Among a litany of other conclusions, Palantir determined the group was prone to violence because its “Manifesto’s intellectual influences include ‘Pancho Villa, Che Guevara, Leon Trotsky, [and] Cuban revolutionary Jose Martí,’ a list of military commanders and revolutionaries with a history of violent actions.”

I don’t know enough about Pancho Villa or Leon Trotsky to be able to elaborate some sarcasm out of such nonsense, but I happened to be born in Cuba to a “revolutionary” (then dissident) family who was a very good combat friend of Guevara (el ché actually suggested my brother’s name). I talked about a story my dad related to me about him here:

How unfortunate that Guevara (a petit bourgeois of direct Spanish and Irish aristocratic descent) didn’t go on with his life as a doctor or better yet, became a representative of some United Fruit Company or any other gringo business exploiting Latin American people!

About Jose Martí motivating violence I will just cite one of the most beautiful poetry I have ever read (which import you can only read off from its context)

Y para el cruel que me arranca
El corazón con que vivo,
Cardo ni oruga cultivo:
Cultivo la rosa blanca.
~
I Have a White Rose to Tend (Verse XXXIX)
I have a white rose to tend
In July as in January;
I give it to the true friend
Who offers his frank hand to me.

And for the cruel one whose blows
Break the heart by which I live,
Thistle nor thorn do I give:
For him, too, I have a white rose.
~
They made an excellent movie about him (even if a bit too emotional):

// __ José Martí: El ojo del canario (with English subtitles)

youtube.com/watch?v=ff8amV9VWCo
~
If you tell not only Cuban but Latin American people that liking Jose Martí would turn you into a some sort of “potential terrorist”, they would think you are as crazy as only gringos can be. To me this is even hopelessly crazier than saying that any gringo who pays taxes to USG is a fair target and deserves to be beheaded, because they are the ones financing the killing of their own people, which, by the way, comes straight from the mindset of Al-Qaeda.

No need for the colon in the previous stanza, no need to specify it is “For him,” and in addition to it, ” too,” is a bit too forceful, when you translate poetry you should not attempt to translate the poetic message itself.

For a reason Martí himself called that poem samlung es:”versos sencillos” > en:”simple/plain/straightforward verses”. It is hard enough to expose the poetry in simplicity.

Your article desperately tries to make our humble and worthless companies appear to be most diabolical kind of terror machines. Actually, they are still newbies in the dark arts. The Russians and the Chinese walk in and walk out of our systems whenever they want, and with whatever they want, and our so-called world champion hacks can neither do anything to prevent this intrusion, nor can they find out how this was done. For months our folks led by President Obama himself have been complaining about Russians hacking our elections, and if perchance a small element of your accusation was correct we should have not only plugged the leaks, but could have easily stolen back all the materials.

So please go easy on our champs. They are also endowed with the same level of competence that saw our great President get a Nobel Prize for being the first BLM chap to get elected to the highest public office. All these are fake credentials, like all the fake news that we are getting bombarded with from CNN and MSNBC.

The lack of journalistic professionalism that seethes from the second sentence of this article leads one to question the scruples of both the author and editorial board. I thought this was an information based article, not an editorial?

Sam Biddle, the author of this article, used to coordinate social media witch hunts against thought criminals who dared to tweet something that goes against the SJW mentality. Now he has changed his tune and worries about privacy. Funny, isn’t it?

why do i get the feeling that this software was produced in house with the cia and nsa and to cover their asses they used inqtel (cia) funds to start an interdependent company to scale across the world for 19.99?

I have a question for these clowns. do they actually think that given their active participation and encouragement of fascism in this country; once the proverbial shit hits the fans, that they’re going to be immune from the consequences of the impending domestic war?

Do you cocksuckers actually think that there’s a hole deep enough ANYWHERE in this world for you to hide in?

Guys, you will not be able to hide from the carnage that you both helped create, so just pray to whatever God you believe in that this country’s current political and social chaos gets resolved peacefully, because if the rest of us have to bleed, then trust me…

Keep in mind that this comment section is likely one of the most monitored/PRISM/XKEYSCORE targeted threads in cyberspace, and that every brave commenters here is likely targeted and data-based at the NSA et ass level.

This is the EXACT case this article is making. It is in fact a wholesale slaughter of free association and speech.

I have been doing some timing probes with this comments section, and note that much of the current slowdown in comments occurs when certain people using certain nyms from certain areas are highly active here. Notably, when those from the Los Angeles area are active.

And don’t believe for one minute that Tor isn’t completely defeated by man-in-middle and man-on-side attacks. I suspect they are using these threads, and the people who write here to target these exact exploits.

Keep an eye on those dialogues with mixed Spanish speakers, and “right wing” posters, many of whom are likely working in certain government sectors where oppression and bullying is the norm.

Then, the topic of “organized stalking” is guaranteed to slow down every thread where it appears. You can test that yourself. I am doing that as I write this last phrase.

In the demo, Palantir engineers showed how their software could be used to identify Wikipedia users who belonged to a fictional radical religious sect and graph their social relationships.

Among a litany of other conclusions, Palantir determined the group was prone to violence because its “Manifesto’s intellectual influences include ‘Pancho Villa, Che Guevara, Leon Trotsky, [and] Cuban revolutionary Jose Martí,’ a list of military commanders and revolutionaries with a history of violent actions.”

THIS is what is WRONG with AMERICA.

Understand, much writing and participation, like here, is a manner of protest to the way people are provided for. God intended “fruitful and multiply” because food was plentiful. Now, people are plentiful and food is not. Instead of putting population back into balance, the money gods have decided that life support is a luxury. And as the world starts to boil over, people will object. And as people voice out, the spy masters will be quick to condemn them for not agreeing to be self sacificed for the profits of the powerful.

Did you NOT read the disclaimer at the bottom of the link you posted, or are you TRYING to mislead anyone casually glancing at your post?

From you link:
This table lists candidates receiving money from this organization in 2015-2016. The organizations themselves did not donate, rather the money came from the organizations’ PACs, their individual members or employees or owners, and those individuals’ immediate families. Organization totals may include subsidiaries and affiliates.

Note: “… their individual Members or employees … and those individuals’ immediate families.”

Question’s back to you now, Jamie. Being careless, or purposefully misleading?

What? Oh, yes,right. Only Donald Trump can abuse his Presidential power. Obama, Clinton? No! They would never do such a heinous crime, because like Sam Biddle, they were saint democrats and paladins of liberalism. Whatever useful information was on this article dies with your biased partisanship, Sam.

I encourage reading the articles related to Thiel and his cohorts linked by Pedinska below. As Glenn notes in one of the articles byline, these acts really do underscore how the actions by Thiel and these folks “reveal a deeply lawless mindset.”

[[[DONALD TRUMP HAS inherited the most powerful machine for spying ever devised. How this petty, vengeful man might wield and expand the sprawling American spy apparatus, already vulnerable to abuse, is disturbing enough on its own. ]]]

You know what? I think that’s the reason the Commies are so pissed off about a fair election result.

Theil was financed by the CIA, originally.

For the past 15+ years, the commies have built the Orwellian Nighmare. OOOPS. They didn’t expect a non-politician, non-CIA operative would end up sitting on top of the pile.

The CIA/NSA/TheEStablishment created an Orwellian Nightmare… and, now, they aren’t on top of the crap pile anymore.

THat’s why they are paying stooges to riot and burn main streets across the country.

Now imagine if hundreds of thousands of less powerful, more and less visible, petty, vengeful men and women of every political stripe had access to that same powerful machine. Think globally act locally? Palantir soaks in CIA money.

The both received INQTEL and or DARPA / IARPA seed money. Good question though. How much money do they get from the USGOV directly (or indirectly on multi party research efforts) and how do they trade in kind services use of assets facilities laboratories etc.?

This article makes it clear Thiel and Palantir are lying. Offices in McClean, VA? Come on!!
I think ‘Saruman” used the Palantir, not Sauron.
The sample they use is hilarious. A ‘religious” terror group inspired by atheists and mass activists like Trotsky and Che, or radical nationalists like Marti or peasant revolutionaries like Villa certainly makes no sense, though maybe to techies who understand absolutely no politics it does.

“Mr. Beale worked as a Regional Territory Manager for Artist Graphics, a former sister company of Comtrol Corporation that specialized in providing digital graphics solutions for the CAD and document imaging markets.” August 22 2007

‘…“augmented reality” experience. It’s unclear what exactly this means or could even look like.’

What it would look like, and sense as, is ‘artificial synchronicity’. A Daily Beast author, for example in early 2016, might have explored the ‘mesmerizing’ as a ‘cult’ phenomenon. With Canada as denoted being part of the Five Eyes.

We can think of these sorts of developments with angst or on the model of biological evolution (not as evolution!). In essence, every permutation with positive probability will occur and be tested against individual and species survival. Humans expand that model into the realm of imagined possibilities.

Mechanical imagination has given us refrigerators and airplanes. Digital imagination will also be fully tested and implemented to the extent possible. It is going to happen. What is not clear is how humans as biological entities will respond.

Mr Thiel advocates willfully adapting to a transhuman state. Mr Musks most recent thoughts on taming impending AI include willfully adapting humans to a transhuman state that would of intrinsic value to a nascent AI. Thats the if you cant eat em join em school.

But what do you feed a nascent AI residing in, around or among all those varied technologies owned or controlled by (did you guess yet?) US SigInt?
To e sure it is being fed every bit of data coming through NSA servers and US, EU or Israeli “Brain Projects”. All the alphanumeric captcha responses for every conceivable variation over time. Every picture or video of a place, person or thing via any device from every angle in any light for every conceivable variation over time. The same would be true for the cumulative ongoing scientific discoveries stolen and impoved upon by the USA IC. These will include ut are not limited to Military Industrial Intelligence Population Biological Academic Scientific and Technological Research Data from everyone in the world in real time. You feed all that to the AI and share it among that select group of research partners at the same time
you move cutting and bleeding edge science behind paywalls.

You finance the projects even lack budgets won’t touch by automating vast off the books insider trading cabals controlled by the US DoD and ICs and their Private and Academic sector Research Partners. Trading at the speed of light based on an endless stream of illegally obtained correspondence, speech to text transcripts, real time monitoring of every board room, shareholders meeting, tax shelter negotiation, pending financial regulation and master bedroom in the Hamptons. Insider trading pays for what your government won’t.

Not sure what you are implying by the ‘bot’ term.
I wrote:”What is not clear is how humans as biological entities will respond.”
You have responded with gibberish. I think that more will be required.

Humans presently have no effective mechanism analogous to evolved inhibitions of powerful adaptations. The digital world — both hardware and software — will be fully explored in imagination and implemented to the extent possible, regardless of the consequences on social and biological survival. That is the reality facing us; now respond effectively to that!

You convey banal submissive generalities encouraging disengagement and/or inaction. You are clearly unschooled on the world view or opinions of the articles subject or the myriad scientific purposes to which big data may be applied toward those ends. As for gibberish we needn’t look any further than this…

James Keyes (I) wrote:”What is not clear is how humans as biological entities will respond”

TO WHAT JAMES? TO WHAT?

Humans presently have no effective mechanism analogous to evolved inhibitions of powerful adaptations.

TRULY REMARKABLE GIBBERISH 1

The digital world — both hardware and software — will be fully explored in imagination and implemented to the extent possible, regardless of the consequences on social and biological survival.

An analyst using XKEYSCORE could pull every IP address in Moscow and Tehran that visited a given website or made a Skype call at 14:15 Eastern Time, for example, and then import the resulting data set into Palantir in order to identify additional connections between the addresses or plot their positions using Google Earth.

Humm that is impressive. .. and, yet, nobody knows with any certainty if Putin ‘hacked the election’?

*Of course, I suppose the IP addresses ‘pulled’ in Moscow and Iran could be Micah using Tor. … and I think I’ve still got an old copy of Fox Pro relational data base that could, theoretically, do the same thing if scaled up.

The entire point of some of these things isn’t live and let live, but rather take and hoard. It could be gold, it could be slaves, it could be secrets — all taken and hoarded.

Palantir sounds like a program designed to take and hoard that which rightly belongs to others. (Private information.)

For instance, say a book club decides to read a series of books. Their collective decision displays an interest — a collective interest — that has no significance outside of the book club. Who cares about, say, 19th Century American authors except this self-created group of book enthusiasts.

But let’s say, instead of a book club, a group decides to research how to make a nuclear bomb with ordinary household items. This would have some significance.

Any intelligence system makes judgments about what it considers meaningful or significant.

That judgment, in itself, becomes meaningful. Meaning drives meaning in the same cliched way a hammer drives the meaning of a nail. This sort of tautology — the thing defines itself — cannot become anything other than a sort of taking and hoarding. The taking agency must — MUST — make its judgments according to its own metrics. Is a book club that reads the Koran a terrorist cell? Is a chemistry class a bomb-making group? Is a group of Muslim teenagers talking about US foreign policy a terrorist cell? How about a group of strangers posting on a new media website established by an oligarch?

There is no objective answer. Any series of collective interests — factions — can be imputed as nefarious or benign by those who — themselves part of a collective — define the goals. Girl scout cookies might be a plot by major pharmaceutical interests to increase diabetes drug sales. Who knows?

Palantir sounds like a capitalist device designed to gather and hoard information much like a thresher gathers and hoards grain or a gold miner’s pan extracts and collects gold.

Except this sort of gathering is always and entirely subjective as defined by the gathering collective. Necessarily.

The world will just have to hope Palantir’s most powerful customers follow the rules.

Blaming Thiel is like blaming gun manufacturers for murders with guns. It’s Democrat-think and shouldn’t be done, ever. The fault lies with the American voters who need to stand up and change things in DC. Trump has promised to drain the swamp but he may not see all the vermin there or he may fail. If the DND wants to be relevant in the next decade, they’d better reorganize and work WITH the Trump administration. A constant adversary is not what is needed. We need constructive ideas and compromise. Governing by consensus is better than being the 49% who lost the election to someone you hate and fear.

Constructively engaging our enemies is the last thing the Deep State wants us to do.

Regardless of who is President the Deep State runs the show (along with private sector assistance knowingly or unwittingly) fielding agent provocateurs and paid informants among peaceful protesters, destroying the careers and reputations of adversaries, staging domestic and international false flag sarin gas attacks, or airplane strikes or driving hijacked trucks into crowds or planting IEDs or grooming random (an not so random) shooters or kill the french cartoonists or lone gunman or “simply in the stage of planning” attacks by “known threats” who after months of “planning” purchasing burner phones, living under assumed names and perfecting the execution of their plan leave their actual ID behind.

In fact if you look REALLY REALLY closely you’ll notice there are zero ethnic RUSSIANS among them IF ANY. Perhaps the terrorist threat we’ve created will never meaningfully replace the former “Soviet Union” that Bill Binney defended us so ably against WITHOUT the wholesale disclosure of the private communications of US citizens.

Donald Trump just wandered into Obamas MSM sanctioned Police State. Thats not good either I suppose but still.

And don’t forget Shrub’s/Cheney’s/Rummy’s police state, which Binney has mentioned in his many YT videos as having existed before Obama. It’s simply been further refined and expanded in the past 15-20 years.

There isn’t a dime’s worth of difference between the two ruling oligarch parties.

This is the world we live in now. Palantir is not the only company that provides this type of technology/services – not even the only one that works for the government. This type of data analysis has traditionally been kickstarted by government contracts because the amount of data the government has is astounding. Oracle – the largest database company in the world – was started by Larry Ellison, who developed his initial product while working with the CIA in the late 1970’s.

I work for another database/analytics vendor and this article describes a pretty standard engagement model for a top priority customer. If a customer that we have a giant contract with wants some enhancement to the product, we’ll work with them to implement it so we don’t lose the contract. I’m not defending the type of data the NSA is collecting but rest assured basically every company that you interact with is trying to collect as much data about you as possible. Larger companies can afford to do it better, and the US government is a large company.

Peter Thiel annoys me too (as does POTUS) but this article clearly tries to make him out as some sort of scapegoat for what some people see as overreach by the NSA. I know you’ve got a personal vendetta against the guy, but that’s dumb.

Palantir (like many other companies with government contracts) sells a database that can store whatever data the government can find. If the government tries to put illegally acquired data in that database, that is the government’s fault, not Peter Thiel’s.

“But how do you make so much data comprehensible for human spies? As the additional documents published with this article demonstrate, Palantir sold its services to make one of the most powerful surveillance systems ever devised even more powerful, bringing clarity and slick visuals to an ocean of surveillance data.”

And then and now, tie that in with OCEAN as seen in the GCHQ Art of Deception powerpoint, and, well then, there we have it. Ocean of Personality trait IP targeting:

“The [OCEAN] Big Five personality traits, also known as the five factor model (FFM), is a widely examined theory of five broad dimensions used by some psychologists to describe the human personality and psyche.”

And the name of that powerpoint, lead clearly back to the Hoffman Report:

“The Hoffman Report: The Investigation into the American Psychological Association (APA)By John M. Grohol, Psy.D.

The Hoffman Report is the informal name for the 2015 investigation into the American Psychological Association’s (APA) practices regarding its relaxing of ethical standards for psychologists involved in torture interrogations.”

Hey. At least Sams judgmental streak is consistent. Here’s how he (and certain other recent hires around here) feels about Julian Assange…

“And then there’s WikiLeaks, which after a long, sad slide into paranoia, conspiracy theorizing, and general internet toxicity has made no attempt to mask its affection for Vladimir Putin and its crazed contempt for Hillary Clinton. (Julian Assange has been stuck indoors for a very, very long time.) If you look at all of this and sort of squint, it looks quite strong indeed, an insurmountable heap of circumstantial evidence too great in volume to dismiss as just circumstantial or mere coincidence.”

Thanks to Bush and Obama and all the “littlest” liars . Hillary would have kept the security State running smooth. Trump may teach US the value of Constitutional Law, this may even be his purpose? I am glad to see republicans and democrats that committed sedition now supporting Our Constitution. many in both parties were willing to subvert the Constitution for their political preferences.

All power show keep in mind those in Government civil service and in the Military services that swore an oath to defend the Constitution and will keep it.

In February of 2011 Mr. Biddle’s colleague and Intercept founding editor Glenn Greenwald revealed that journalistic supporters of Wikileaks – he, himself, was specifically named in material that was obtained – and Wikileaks itself, were being targeted by HBGary Federal and that Palantir had participated in that process (emphasis in original):

As I noted on Friday, the parties implicated in the smear campaigns aimed at WikiLeaks supporters and Chamber of Commerce critics have attempted to heap all the blame on HBGary Federal (“HBGary”) and its CEO, Aaron Barr. Both Bank of America and the Chamber — the intended clients — vehemently deny any involvement in these schemes and have harshly denounced them. The other two Internet security firms whose logos appeared on the proposals — Palantir Technologies and Berico Technologies — both issued statements terminating their relationship with HBGary and insisting that they had nothing to do with these plots. […]

Palantir, in particular, has been quite aggressive about trying to distance itself. They initially issued a strong statement denouncing the plots, then had their CEO call me vowing to investigate and terminate any employees who were involved, then issued another statement over the weekend claiming that “Palantir never has and never will condone the sort of activities that HBGary recommended” and “Palantir did not participate in the development of the recommendations that Palantir and others find offensive.” Such vehemence is unsurprising: the Palo-Alto-based firm relies for its recruitment efforts on maintaining a carefully cultivated image as a progressive company devoted to civil liberties, privacy and Internet freedom — all of which would be obviously sullied by involvement in such a scheme.

But as Salon‘s Justin Elliott reports, there are newly emerged facts which directly contradict Palantir’s denials. On Sunday night, Anonymous released an additional 25,000 emails from HBGary, and Forbes‘ Andy Greenberg was the first to make this discovery:

The emails also show that it was Barr who suggested pressuring Salon.com journalist Glenn Greenwald, though Palantir, another firm working with HBGary Federal, quickly accepted that suggestion and added it to the PowerPoint presentation that the group was assembling.

[…]

The leaders at the very top of Palantir were aware of the Team Themis work, though the details of what was being proposed by Barr may well have escaped their notice. Palantir wasn’t kidding around with this contract; if selected by H&W and the Chamber, Palantir planned to staff the project with an experienced intelligence operative, a man who “ran the foreign fighter campaign on the Syrian border in 2005 to stop the flow of suicide bombers into Baghdad and helped to ensure a successful Iraqi election. As a commander, [he] ran the entire intelligence cycle: identified high-level terrorists, planned missions to kill or capture them, led the missions personally, then exploited the intelligence and evidence gathered on target to defeat broader enemy networks” . . . .

After the Anonymous attacks and the release of Barr’s e-mails, his partners furiously distanced themselves from Barr’s work. Palantir CEO Dr. Alex Karp wrote, “We do not provide — nor do we have any plans to develop — offensive cyber capabilities . . . .” Berico said (PDF) that it “does not condone or support any effort that proactively targets American firms, organizations or individuals. We find such actions reprehensible and are deeply committed to partnering with the best companies in our industry that share our core values. Therefore, we have discontinued all ties with HBGary Federal.”

But both of the Team Themis leads at these companies knew exactly what was being proposed (such knowledge may not have run to the top). They saw Barr’s e-mails, and they used his work. His ideas on attacking WikiLeaks made it almost verbatim into a Palantir slide about “proactive tactics.”

And who went to prison for these revelations? Why, Barrett Brown, who wrote numerous columns for The Intercept while still imprisoned for that offense.

The real problems for Brown began in 2011. In February, Anonymous hacked into the computer system of the private security firm HB Gary Federal and then posted thousands of emails containing incriminating and nefarious acts. Among them was a joint proposal by that firm – along with the very well-connected firms of Palantir and Berico – to try to persuade Bank of America and its law firm, Hunton & Williams, to hire them to destroy the reputations and careers of WikiLeaks supporters and, separately, critics of the Chamber of Commerce (as this New York Times article on that episode details, I was named as one of the people whose career they would seek to destroy). HB Gary Federal’s CEO Aaron Barr, who advocated the scheme, was fired as a result of the disclosures, but continues to this day to play a significant role in this public-private axis of computer security and intelligence.

Brown became obsessed with journalistically investigating every strand exposed by these HB Gary Federal emails and devoted himself to relentlessly exposing this world. He did the same with the 2012 leak of millions of emails from the private intelligence firm Stratfor, obtained by Anonymous and published by WikiLeaks.

Freedom of speech and freedom of the internet, that net neutral was a way for the government to get there greedy hands on the internet. Stop the Government from spying on everybody. Use the search engine that does not change its results for political reasons and respects your privacy, just good old fashion results that are not tracked. Lookseek.com Have a great day

I was just thinking about Mr. Thiel in the context of the Trump/Media war. Maybe Theil could buy CNN or other Fakestream News outlet and straighten it out (like he did Gawker). If not Theil, then maybe that old shark, Carl Icahn, still has a couple bites left in him. If that doesn’t work, Trump supporters may have to create their own hedge fund and go after the media.

As far as Palantir goes, I wonder if they they have a subscription service for News organizations. Maybe that is an open space for new products. Like for example, someone could develop an open source version called Galadriel’s Mirror used for tracking government(s).

Palantir looks like reprise of the PROMIS software which formed the basis for Al Qaeda, among other things.

While Thiel is pure evil–Bathory meets Promis–the Snowden archive has now been relegated to fighting for the ghost of Gawker.

I’m not saying that there aren’t worse things that could have happened to Glenn and the Snowden archive than Pierre Omidyar and the Intercept–but every day that number of possible universes gets smaller.

Not yet. But Sam did a hell of a job with this piece and I’m glad we can crowdsourcing opensource Snowden docs at the Intercept to further understand this or future NSA sock puppet hunts.

HEY SAM: I was wondering though Sam if the Intercept might include formal redaction notations specifically citing the exemptions providing the standard FOIA Exemptions for non disclosure or even just specify if it’s the spices, the methods or the personnel you’re seeking to protect up to and including four (4) to nine (9) years after the fact. After doing what Palantir has been doing to us for the last decade or more (rendering across the board support for doxing every individual or group on their clients enemies lists) you should dump anything of theirs further illuminating their true nature and form.

Wnt- Here below is one example of the “Terrorist Surveillance Program” on Wikipedia where it is suggested that the link and the subject matter are being monitored from Britain, and which suggests that the NSA has done exactly what you are asking.

Read through the parts about Blandra’s comments and such:

“Elizabeth Blandra account is PeaceFrog71″ who I also suspect to be one Keith Labella Esq. who is an activist against surveillance:

Palantir appears to have a bullet proof business model. The government built its product, provided startup capital and now is its main customer. This is American entrepreneurialism at its best and the dividends paid to its founders are richly deserved.

You know, I’m even wondering if they leaked this stuff on purpose to keep privacy advocates talking about them, so that the government could buy their software to give us something to be paranoid about other than something else that we really should be paranoid about. That way the software doesn’t actually have to work, which is way cheaper to develop and maintain.